John Brady (Wicklow, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We welcome any provision that will mean additional financial security for workers when they reach old age. That said, we have some concerns in regard to the Strawman that was published and we made a submission on that. To come to the crux of the issue, there is poor coverage and only one out of three employees have a private pension in the private sector. When we take into account the public service, it pushes that up to 47% but it is still very low. We know there are serious concerns in terms of pension charges and uncertainty around defined contribution and defined benefit schemes, all of which needs to be addressed. Auto-enrolment gives us an opportunity to address all of these issues but there are still key questions to be answered, which is why I asked for a timeframe. While there were over 100 written submissions and that is welcome, it is a low number, although I presume many of those were from organisations. When can we expect to see the next stage of the process?

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